The Riddle House
by Skiagrapher
Summary: It’s odd, really, how I managed to acquire the better features from the two of you." Young Voldemort pays his absent father a visit. No one's happy to see him. A speculation on that eventful night in the Riddle House. One shot.


_A/N: Written after the release of __Half-Blood Prince__. The book increased my fascination with Voldemort as a character. So I wrote this speculation about what happened in the Riddle House. Written back in 2006, I think, but I've edited it._

_You may have seen it before under a different pen name, but it's still me and it's still mine, though the characters and Harry Potter in general are not._

The Riddle House

He gazed dispassionately down at the man at his feet. He was unable to muster much emotion about this man, and what emotion he could feel was sneering disgust. This… the last pure-blood descendant of Salazar Slytherin was this unhinged, ragged, certainly inbred bit of filth? Was he, himself really related to _this_? He could now hardly count himself surprised that Slytherin's heir hadn't emerged before.

Still, the wizard mused, he had proven himself useful. He grabbed the ragged man's wand, pocketed his own, and swept quickly from the Gaunt House.

It was almost ludicrously easy to sneak up on the maid in the large house. She had hardly turned around when he incapacitated her. He murmured "_Obliviate_" quickly and stepped over her suddenly quite soporific body. He made his way down the hall and slipped into the large dining hall. In the split second before the three occupants of the room noticed him, his eyes had swept over them and landed…

_They landed on himself_.

His face was aged twenty, perhaps thirty years, but it was, unmistakably, his own face.

"Who are you? What are you doing here?" demanded a raspy female voice, her voice ringing with outrage and not a small amount of fear, but it didn't shake a bit. He didn't answer her. He didn't even look at her. His gaze was locked with the man who looked so much like him, who was staring back, trying and failing to contain his alarm.

He grinned very slightly, his mouth barely turning up. "Yes, we do seem to look a great deal alike, don't we?" The man started, his eyebrows furrowing. "Riddle." The last was sharp, short, spat like an oath.

"Who are you?" Riddle repeated his mother's question, but his voice was not quite as strong as it might have otherwise been. To the younger man's immense satisfaction, he was deeply disturbed.

"Who am I?" he repeated, almost as though asking the same question of himself. "Who I _am_ is Lord Voldemort." His eyes seemed to gleam red for an instant. "However, you're probably more concerned more with my given name, which I shall inform you is Tom Marvolo Riddle." The last three words were spoken with a very quiet, very subtle malice. Riddle's eyes widened.

"What is the meaning of this?" Demanded Riddle's father. "What sort of nonsense is this? My son's name? And what's this with 'Marvolo?'" He paused, and then seemed to make a connection in his head. "Do you mean that nut on the other side of the valley, the one who finally snuffed it, which I am not at all sorry for?" he added bitterly.

Voldemort's eyes traveled briefly over to the older Riddle. "It does, in fact, refer to Marvolo Gaunt. You see, my mother—" at this his eyes flicked back to Riddle— "made a few dying wishes, one of which was that my middle name was to be after her father."

Riddle's eyes widened and his face blanched. Seeing this, Voldemort's visage pulled into a glittering, mocking smirk. "She made two others, you know," Voldemort told Riddle in a very soft voice, as though only telling him. "One being that my first and surname would be _my_ father's—"

"There are a lot of Tom Riddles" Riddle said loudly as he turned away, in a panicked voice, as though also trying to convince himself.

"—The other being that I would look like my father," Voldemort finished.

Riddle looked back at him, his expression unreadable.

"It looks as though she got all her wishes," Voldemort said, his voice even softer than it had been.

Riddle's expression hardened.

"Did you even know that she was going to have your child?" Voldemort asked in an amused voice.

"She told me a great many things, the majority of which were lies," Riddle retorted. "I seemed to wake, one day, came to my senses… and she came to me in tears, telling me outlandish tales about magic and love and children…. Well, there was no way I was going to swallow it. I know not by what 'magic' she hoodwinked me, but I wasn't going to stay around. How was I to know when she was telling me the truth? She told me she was a witch the same breath she told me she was pregnant."

"She _was_ a witch. And fortunately for me, although rather unfortunately for you, she has also passed on her magical ability to me," Voldemort replied smoothly. "It's odd, really, how I managed to acquire the better features from the two of you. I might thank you for the handsome face, I've found it rather useful. But I could not be truthful if I said I prized it anywhere near as much as I do _her_ gift to me…"

"You're insane," Riddle spat. "You _want_ to do magic? You want that abnormality?"

"Yes."

"And where, exactly, do you think it will get you?"

"Concerned for my future, _father_?" Voldemort sneered.

Riddle flushed, an ugly expression on his face. "I want nothing to do with you. As far as I'm concerned, I made a terrible mistake in letting myself be taken in by your whore of a mother. I am not your father."

"No, you're not," Voldemort retorted coldly. "I have no need for a father. Or a mother. Nor for family at all, for that matter, nor for friends. I will be the most powerful man of all time, and I will have no need for anything of the sort. The only thing I have a use for is my wand."

At this, he drew a wand that wasn't his own from his pocket. Riddle's father started up, and his mother cried, "What is this?" but Voldemort was faster than they. Pointing the wand at them, he shouted "_Avada Kedavra_!" There was a flash of green light and a loud _whooshing_ sound, and Riddle's parents slumped over their plates, immobile and breathless. Riddle, too, was frozen, but Voldemort could see him trembling faintly, staring at his parents' bodies. Voldemort walked slowly toward his father.

"This from the child you never thought existed," Voldemort said in his softest voice yet. "The child you wouldn't have wanted even if you had known I lived."

Riddle slowly turned his head to meet his son's eyes. "I'm still not sorry," Riddle replied just as softly. "Something tells me you should never have been brought into the world anyway…."

Voldemort sneered. "_AVADA KEDAVRA_!" he cried, and with the same brilliant flash of green light and rushing sound that had announced the death of his parents, Tom Riddle slumped over his own dinner plate. Voldemort looked down at his father's body and laughed a high, cold, cruel laugh.

Without looking at his father or grandparents, he swept from the Riddle House.

_AN: Please let me know your thoughts, good or bad._


End file.
